Toyota leads August decline in sales

Toyota Motor Corp, Japan's biggest carmaker, led the biggest monthly drop in domestic auto sales in almost ten years, as the country's unemployment rate remained near its highest level since 2006 and job prospects worsened.

Sales of cars, trucks and buses, excluding minicars, fell 15 percent to 193,902 last month from a year earlier, the Japan Automobile Dealers Association said in a statement yesterday.

The drop, the most since December 1998, was amplified by two fewer business days compared with the year-ago period.